Photshop and HDR's

Photshop and HDR's

Just loaded the new Photoshop and it supports HDR. YOu can now make you your own HDRI probes folks without all the hassle. Here is Allister's lamp using a probe I made tonight.

Time to get the fisheye out of storage!
 

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Another more dramatic probe. I should of had the probe set on panorama.
 

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they are looking great Jake... especially the second one...

your HDRI looks so much better than what is available on the net... veyr nice indeed... maybe you will have to start posting them... what with you having so much free time... :lol: :lol: :lol:

how hard is it to do it in PS... have not seen any reviews referring specifically to the new HDRI abilities of PS...

just now need to get hold of the new PS... bugga about that...

cheers
Trevor
 
Hi,
excellent work Jake. I don't own the new Photoshop yet but I think many people would be interested in how to make their own light probes. Is it difficult?

I don't know how much time you have but that would be a nice idea for a tutorial. :wink:

By,
Martin
 
Martin said:
Hi,
excellent work Jake. I don't own the new Photoshop yet but I think many people would be interested in how to make their own light probes. Is it difficult?

I don't know how much time you have but that would be a nice idea for a tutorial. :wink:

By,
Martin

Sure I could do a tutorial. I got my old Nikon 990 out of storage and chareged up the battery because I have a 180 degree fisheye that works in it. I'm going to shoot a couple later this morning and I'll post the results. If they're any good I'll post the HDRs.

It really isn't to difficult. You can use a fisheye or a one of those big reflector balls you see in gardens. You just shoot a range of 5-8 photos. The first is exposed for the highlights the last is exposed for the shadows and a range of shots in between. Open photoshop and in the automated menu you'll now find 'make HDR'. You pick your photos and photoshop will blend them into one 32-bit image.You can use regular photos in panorama format or fisheyes in the probe format.

it will be interesting how the fisheye works. Nothing is ever as easy I as it appears, but this will be good way to get accurate lighting and environmental conditions for specific sites you may be modeling.

There have always been a few ways to make them, but Photoshop just made it a whole lot easier.
 
Jake said:
Sure I could do a tutorial. I got my old Nikon 990 out of storage and chareged up the battery because I have a 180 degree fisheye that works in it. I'm going to shoot a couple later this morning and I'll post the results. If they're any good I'll post the HDRs.

That sounds very good for me. I sure such a tutorial would be a must read. :D
It would be also amazing to have some more free HDRI's in the web. Until now I only found very few. :cry:

By,
Martin
 
The only problem I see is the working in 32-bit. I think that Photoshop will convert 16 bit images but I don't know about 8. I'm going to take the 990 out for a spin now. It may be that I will have to be a cheapo fisheye for my d70. I quit using the 990 because of some color fringing etc.

I'll let you know in a couple hours if it works well enough to get excited over or if it's back to the drawing board.
 
well, as creating an HDRI to light a scene is a snap with the new Photoshop. Getting the photoshere shape HDRI just right is another problem.

I thought I could get something close with my fisheye-wrong. So ibought a garden gazing ball and photographed the the reflection. Better, but still distorted when imported into Cheetah.

I'll post some samples tonight, but Martins' new post concerning Cheetah's support for rotating HDR's is good news so I need to get cracking and figure this out. If anybody has some experience in this field, please post some info.

Here's some of reference material I have been using.


http://athens.ict.usc.edu/Probes/

http://www.ict.usc.edu/graphics/skyprobes/ Good collection of skyprobes here

http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/

http://www.pointzero.nl/dump/mirrorball_theory/


This is a gazing ball.
http://www.mainstreetseedandsupply.com/gazingglobe.htm?source=adwords&creative=gazing-content
 
Well as you can see the lighting isn't bad, but the actual HDRI's are horrendously crooked. I think I know why, but I'll have to wait to rephotograph-maybe tommorrow. I believe I need to take two shots to get the full 180 degrees from side to side to help with the distortion and to eliminate my ugly mug from the reflection.

When I get it figure out I will post a tutorial. Meanwhile just about any image converted to a 32 bit HDR can be use to light a scene. The problem would be if you have any highly reflective items in your rendering that would show the imperfections in your light probe.
 

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that flying minis pic is pretty cool Jake...

shows the possible use of C3D for graphics/illustration/advertising work beautifully...

cheers
Trevor
 
Maybe if you took the photograph from the top, the HDRI would look better. It's kinda hard to do. I think it's because the HDRI doesn't cover the whole 360 degree environment. If you took the photo from the top of the ball the 360 environment is covered (except ground). Maybe that works?
BTW looking forward to a tutorial!!
 
peer said:
Maybe if you took the photograph from the top, the HDRI would look better. It's kinda hard to do. I think it's because the HDRI doesn't cover the whole 360 degree environment. If you took the photo from the top of the ball the 360 environment is covered (except ground). Maybe that works?
BTW looking forward to a tutorial!!

Well, I kind of thought of that too, but without a way to control the HDRI in Cheetah I woulod have to turn my model on its side and work that way to get the sky to work. That still doesn't solve the distortion problem. I would have the same problem as had in landscape mode.

I'll have to study it somemore. I converted the uffizi HDR to a jpeg and then dropped it into Cubic Converter. This is a screen shot. It shows that it is a mirrorball format with 330 of visible image. I'm not sure how this was done, but I believe he is shooting two images 90 degrees of each other for each exposure, which is a lot more work then I originally expected. I'll try sometime this week, but in the meantime if someone has a better methodology I would love to hear it before I start.
 

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I've been though about everything on the web including Paul's site. I have six of his probes and they don't look much different then the one I produced. I just think I need to take more photos to get more coverage on the ball.

I did convert a couple of my QTVRS into panos and then converted them to hdr's in photoshop. Worked really well but shooting a VR is a much more difficult process than shootinga mirror ball.

Always looking for an easier way. I have an animation running at work using the VR HDRI I made. I'll post it tomorrow. Really worked well judging from the small test I made before I started the animation.

Thanks Lisa. I also tried thos free vr's. There is something goofy going on with those puppies. Here's a sample with the HDRI turned up to 80!
 

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Hi Jeff,
you are making great progress with your HDRI's. :D I never tried making my own because the hole process looks quite complicated especially stitching the pictures together.

Some HDRIs are actually quite dark. You need a process called tone mapping to convert the HDRI colors into the [0,1] range a monitor can display. The tone mapping post process has a high priority on my todo list.
I also plan to allow Cheetah3D to save directly to .hdr or OpenEXR files. This will allow the usage of external tonemapping software. It will also allow to render your own syntetic HDRI's. :D

By,
Martin
 
i'll have to bone up on tonemapping. Never used it.

Most of my VR's are stitched together from 26 images. It is a lengthy process. I'm on the verge of buying a Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye or the Sigma 8 mm so I can get that down to 4-8 shots.
 
Well I just made new HDRI from a job I shot in Chicago. Hi-rez and I think it works pretty good. I'll post it somewhere tomorrow. The zip is 16mgs so I have to figure the best way to get it to anyone who wants it. Martin, any ideas? Maybe an HDRI depot? :)
 

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Jake said:
Martin, any ideas? Maybe an HDRI depot? :)
Hi,
a HDRI depot is a great idea. At least theoretically. But HDRI textures tend to be very big (>10 MByte). So if I host many HDRI testures I can get a quite serious traffic on my web page:-( And HDRI textures also attract non Cheetah3D users.

So even although I like the idea I'm a little bit scared to actually make such a download site due to the probably high traffic.

By,
Martin
 
Well that's the same reason I can't host them too long. We'll figure something out. I don't even mind putting them on disk if someone mails a prepaid envelope to me.
 
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